The rabbit-shooting license doesn't mean that you can't ever make any changes to your land......
Changes to the land (such as building) might unavoidably create an adverse side effect on the rabbit shoots, but would legally require compensation to the licencee. OTOH, changes to someone's Win7 installation are entirely avoidable, even if Windows moves "ahead" to later versions, simply by MS leaving those Win7 installations alone.
.... or that you can't sell the land to someone else, or subdivide it
If you sold the land, the obligation to honour the licence would go to the new owner; in English law anyway - it's called a covenant.
Your Windows license....... doesn't say that they have to continue supporting Windows 7/8
I was not expecting continued support - just MS to leave it alone.
......... or that they can't push updates on you.
My rabbit shooting licence does not say the land owner can't tar and feather me.
The customer does NOT own the OS. This has been made clear by licensing agreements
They own the right to use it. To use the thing that they licensed, not something else.
Suppose I give you a licence to shoot rabbits on my land, with no time limit. I cannot one day say that I am changing the licence from shooting rabbits on my land to shooting rats in my cellar, because the rabbit stuff was "only a licence".
What you are claiming sounds like US law, which I understand is in the hands of corporates like Microsoft. None of this twaddle would stand up in a UK court of law.
No one is forcing anyone to use Windows. If you don't like these policies, stop using it.
1) In the UK at least, it is not possible to buy a PC in the high street without Windows pre-installed and hence send money to Microsoft. You can get PC's with blank HDDs, but only from a few specialist bespoke suppliers to generally professional customers. As far as most users are concerned they are forced to use Windows. Any alternative to Windows on a PC will need installing by the user, and the vast majority of users are incapable of that. Slashdot readers excepted.
2) I recall that this discussion is not about using Windows as opposed to an alternative like Linux, it is about the nature of the "upgrade" by default from Win7/8 to Win10. Essentially it is about those people who are happy using Windows 7. They don't want to stop using it; and having bought and paid for it they consider it is their right to keep using it as it is - and most sane people would agree with them whatever the EULA might say.
I don't know what is in the mind of the Microsoft people. They finally get an OS that is stable enough it can run for a week
Hold it there, you have answered your own question. Windows 7 would have been good enough for many people for many years to come (as Windows XP was), which means Microsoft would not have sold as many copies of new versions as they would have liked.
So MS "upgrade" you to something crappy and at the same time steer you towards a rental business model by getting people accustomed to the idea of them controlling your PC or other device. Rental is their wet dream because it gives them predictable income for ever without necessarily having to develop anything new ever again.
A bit unfair to MS to say about Win7 being stable enough to run for a week. You're maybe thinking of Win95 which, by Microsoft's own later admission, would have inevitably crashed after about 20 days (AFAIR), a fact that was never discovered by anyone at the time because it would always crash for some other reason long before it got to the 20 days.
None [of my Win 7 PCs] have forced it on to me. I just have to click decline every week or so
So the default is the upgrade and you must decline repeatedly to avoid it? And you find that perfectly acceptable ?
It is a pity that in being modded down as Troll (as you will be) you will slide down out of sight of many readers. It is a pity because to see an attitude like yours is itself an education in the strangeness of human nature. Unless of course you are trying to be funny.
most of them won't understand that asphalt is cheaper and is used more effectively than rails.
It is not cheaper, it is just funded in a different way. Rails have to be funded by the railway company. In the UK at least roads are funded by public money and it is lost in the noise of it. Effectively private motorists subsidise things like buses and trucks, massively. I pay the equivalent of about $1 per 5 miles in my car tax, and more in the fuel tax.
What is expensive about rail is the insane set of rules and regulations about safety and finance - which, unlike on the road, are strictly observed. To spend $x on a railway project (like lengthening a platform to enable longer trains to use it) you will need to spend $5x on a safety case and $5x on a financial case. I have seen it at close hand.
Where do you live that politicians like rail? My politicians love cars, and have been actively removing rail at every chance.
Same where I am (in the UK). Mrs Thatcher set the tone - only known to have travelled on a train once in her adult life and that was for a ceremony.
Conservatives hate railways because they think they are nests of trade unionism.
Liberals hate railways because they are essentially run in authoritarian ways.
Socialists hate railways because they think they are transport for rich people (This is the UK remember).
the most frequent cause of sudden speed changes I see is people driving too slowly as they try to merge onto the freeway. That causes people already on the freeway to have to slow down or change lanes to avoid them, which increases the risk of an accident.
It is even worse if you are joining the freeway immediately behind that person because you are the one that the truck behind will crash into.
And TFA comparing car and train capacity is silly because it excludes time spent stopping to load/unload passengers. The whole reason people drive cars instead of take public transportation is because (1) they're sick of waiting for the bus/train to show up, and (2) they're sick of the trip taking 2x-3x longer than if they drive because the bus/train has to stop at a bunch of places they're not interested in going.
That is obviously an American view; I understand trains there are rather slow, and if people are that slow getting on and off them it is probably because they are not used to them enough. I try to make workaday journeys by train in the UK because I am sick of sitting in my car in traffic jams taking 2x-3x longer than the train. The last time I drove from Bristol to a suburb in London (130 miles) four years ago it took so long and was so frustrating that I vowed never to drive that journey ever again. I stick to using my car for recreational journeys and local shopping trips nowadays, UK road traffic has become so bad.
A London Underground railway line, in its 12ft diameter tunnel, even with its stops, can shift more people per hour than a three-lane highway, both at max capacity.
Well the idea is it wouldn't since they would all hit the breaks at the same time, there should be almost no latency between the 4th car and the 10th
Almost no latency? 4th and 10th !! Multiply that up - what about a thousand cars, or ten thousand, all in line in the rush-hour between say London and Reading (on the M4 motorway in the UK). One minor incident anywhere in those 40 miles (even a routine one like a car in the outer lane needing to get across the inner lanes to turn off) and every car in the entire line must slow or stop in exactly the same way. That's assuming nothing goes wrong (what could possibly?). It is going to be a very jerky journey because there is no cushioning as there is at present.
My third biggest cringe is people hanging on by their hands for more than 30 seconds.
Getting a bit off topic, but even worse, they hang on by one hand only. In fact deliberately let go with the other hand and wave it around pointlessly.
you always see the fights taking place between human/oid opponents manually aiming weapons at each other from less than one hundred feet apart
Aren't you exagerating the distance? I've only seen glimpses of Star Wars, but I seem to remember seeing guys in black leather gowns, toe-to-toe, whacking each other with pink flourescent light tubes. Looked a bit camp to me.
They live on planets with breathable air, too, and have usually, perchance, evolved technically, politically and culturally to about the same point as Earthlings : ie within a few hundred years one way or the other.
The "goodies" among them have exactly the same ethical views as the "good" Earthlings too - a fallacy shared (more seriously) by those among us who see no harm in establishing communication with any real alien intelligent life that we may detect.
Who cares about those people anyway? They don't contribute, they don't produce, they don't pay taxes, or grow the economy.
The worst thing is that they are apparently incapable of coming up with things like street names or block names for themselves (according to TFA anyway).
are we really going to get the world to start using an algorithm for determining location that appears to be proprietary and closed-source?......... Why would anyone build any type of important solution or process on top of this and have their hands tied to this one vendor
Don't worry, market forces and competition will be our friends. Other companies will introduce rival systems with totally different word combinations. In time there will be dozens of alternatives, all different. So your address will need all of them with perhaps semi-colons between each, and each to include a fourth word for the mapping or courier company or other organisation that runs the scheme. So this might be my address:-
the word combinations are deliberately defined so that any valid similar 3 word addresses map to places so far apart that it should be obvious.. that you have used the wrong address.
It is never possible to under-estimate the intelligence of a courier.
bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year.
So how will this system solve that? A sender can still give a bad address.
Most badly addressed mail that I nevertheless get has the postcode wrong, a fairly arbitrary set of letters and numbers. This new system is a totally arbitrary set of words. People do not remember post codes - they copy them from an address book, incoming letter, or database and can copy it wrongly. Likewise, people are not going to remember these word triplets (I've got 50 Xmas cards to send), they will copy them from an address book, incoming letter, or database and can still copy it wrongly. Get one word wrong (I gather pluralisation matters) and it will go to Timbuctoo instead of Kansas.
It would save the Royal Mail and other couriers a lot if their guys actually rang my doorbell when they arrive instead of just posting a "You were out" card through - they seem to have a phobia about it. But I live in a remote scenic area and I think they like the idea of a second morning's relaxing drive this way instead of fighting city traffic the following day.
There are premium accounts where they will throw in a bundle of stuff (e.g. travel insurance, higher interest on current accounts) but they are a rip-off.
This seems odd, addresses are broken down into discrete fields in UK credit reference data
Stop there. That is the problem - my address does not fit into those fields.
I live on a country road that has no name. The address I give is House name - Nearest Town [10 miles away] - County - Post code That is how it is in the Electoral Register and in the Royal Mail database too.
However, when I (or a bank staff member) fill in a computerised application form, the computer insists on a road name or it will not proceed. (As you say, there are discrete fields). So I make a [plausible] road name up. Then the computer goes and checks it against the Electoral Register (or some other datbase it gets from God knows where) and, guess what, it does not match. I am rejected.
I have this problem over and over again, with all sorts of things. People I am dealing with over the counter can see the problem, but they cannot beat the computer system. It is going to get worse with the UK Government talking about requiring address verification for any money transfer. They need to get databases created with a bit of intelligence first.
What does it cost for a bank account in the UK? Are they pursuing collecting two monthy fees from each consumer?
It costs nothing. In fact UK banks used to give interest even on cheque accounts (but no more)
Having said that, some banks have "Gold" accounts (or some such name) which do charge a fee in return for allowing a bigger overdraft or "personal attention" from the manager whatever that involves. I pay no fees, don't need personal attention, never need an overdraft, but am constantly bombarded with hype urging me to "upgrade" to a "gold" account. My banks also have a Byzantine system of fees for stuff like cancelling a cheque or raising your overdraft limit temporarily. I never need any of it.
The day any of my banks (I have about five) try to charge me fees I will withdraw the lot.
where do I get all this magic money you speak of? Working full time does not do it.
Sounds like I am better off than most here, so here are a dozen tips:-
1) Avoid rip-offs. Because all tradesmen (plumbers, decorators, electricians, car mechanics, carpet-layers) rip you off, do everything yourself. I do my own car maintenance (even repairing gearboxes), I have replaced facia boards and guttering around my house, done bricklaying, been up the roof to the chimney to repoint it, even built a chimney.
2) Don't go on fancy holidays. Millions of people (even people who tell me they've "got no money") spend their money to travel around the world on holidays to the Valley of the Kings, Thailand, the Outback etc. Stay at home, or just go locally.
3) Dont eat out or use take-aways.
4) Don't buy stuff (like coffee) from vending machines.
5) Don't go into coffee shops.
6) Don't buy insurance (unless legally required), it's a serious rip-off. Take the risk.
7) Don't go into bars.
8) Never throw anything away. It's suprising how often something is needed again years later.
9) Make your own stuff. Preferably using material you saved in (8). Like making new furniture from the timber of old furniture (which is better timber than you can obtain these days anyway).
10) When you need to buy stuff, buy stuff that's out of fashion, cheap.
11) Don't buy Microsoft products.
12) Don't buy Apple products.
Hope this helps. Sounds too austere? The choice is yours.
I'm in the UK [...] Unless you mean something I don't understand by 'be secured'
He does. Have you considered learning the language of the place you live in?
I am also in the UK and also struggled to understand what the GGP meant by "secured", and I don't consider there is much wrong with my English apart from the occasional typpppppo.
I think what the GGP meant by "secured" is "obtained". In UK English, "secured" generally means "made safe", hence the trans-Atlantic confusion. It is particularly ambiguous in this discussion which is in fact about making money safe.
I believe that what the GGP is saying is that many people do not have enough money to worry about the bank losing or stealing it, or even to be worthwhile putting in a bank at all. Yes, we know that.
For most people getting a bank account in two different countries is quite difficult.
Only if you're American
It has become difficult in the UK to get a bank account in the UK. I have had two applications refused in the last year because the version of my address in the database that the bank uses to auto-complete my address when I type it into the application form is different from the version it then looks up in the electoral roll. At another bank the manager only succeeded in opening an account for me by fiddling the computer somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
The rabbit-shooting license doesn't mean that you can't ever make any changes to your land ......
Changes to the land (such as building) might unavoidably create an adverse side effect on the rabbit shoots, but would legally require compensation to the licencee. OTOH, changes to someone's Win7 installation are entirely avoidable, even if Windows moves "ahead" to later versions, simply by MS leaving those Win7 installations alone.
.... or that you can't sell the land to someone else, or subdivide it
If you sold the land, the obligation to honour the licence would go to the new owner; in English law anyway - it's called a covenant.
Your Windows license ....... doesn't say that they have to continue supporting Windows 7/8
I was not expecting continued support - just MS to leave it alone.
.. ....... or that they can't push updates on you.
My rabbit shooting licence does not say the land owner can't tar and feather me.
The customer does NOT own the OS. This has been made clear by licensing agreements
They own the right to use it. To use the thing that they licensed, not something else.
Suppose I give you a licence to shoot rabbits on my land, with no time limit. I cannot one day say that I am changing the licence from shooting rabbits on my land to shooting rats in my cellar, because the rabbit stuff was "only a licence".
What you are claiming sounds like US law, which I understand is in the hands of corporates like Microsoft. None of this twaddle would stand up in a UK court of law.
No one is forcing anyone to use Windows. If you don't like these policies, stop using it.
1) In the UK at least, it is not possible to buy a PC in the high street without Windows pre-installed and hence send money to Microsoft. You can get PC's with blank HDDs, but only from a few specialist bespoke suppliers to generally professional customers. As far as most users are concerned they are forced to use Windows. Any alternative to Windows on a PC will need installing by the user, and the vast majority of users are incapable of that. Slashdot readers excepted.
2) I recall that this discussion is not about using Windows as opposed to an alternative like Linux, it is about the nature of the "upgrade" by default from Win7/8 to Win10. Essentially it is about those people who are happy using Windows 7. They don't want to stop using it; and having bought and paid for it they consider it is their right to keep using it as it is - and most sane people would agree with them whatever the EULA might say.
I don't know what is in the mind of the Microsoft people. They finally get an OS that is stable enough it can run for a week
Hold it there, you have answered your own question. Windows 7 would have been good enough for many people for many years to come (as Windows XP was), which means Microsoft would not have sold as many copies of new versions as they would have liked.
So MS "upgrade" you to something crappy and at the same time steer you towards a rental business model by getting people accustomed to the idea of them controlling your PC or other device. Rental is their wet dream because it gives them predictable income for ever without necessarily having to develop anything new ever again.
A bit unfair to MS to say about Win7 being stable enough to run for a week. You're maybe thinking of Win95 which, by Microsoft's own later admission, would have inevitably crashed after about 20 days (AFAIR), a fact that was never discovered by anyone at the time because it would always crash for some other reason long before it got to the 20 days.
None [of my Win 7 PCs] have forced it on to me. I just have to click decline every week or so
So the default is the upgrade and you must decline repeatedly to avoid it? And you find that perfectly acceptable ?
It is a pity that in being modded down as Troll (as you will be) you will slide down out of sight of many readers. It is a pity because to see an attitude like yours is itself an education in the strangeness of human nature. Unless of course you are trying to be funny.
most of them won't understand that asphalt is cheaper and is used more effectively than rails.
It is not cheaper, it is just funded in a different way. Rails have to be funded by the railway company. In the UK at least roads are funded by public money and it is lost in the noise of it. Effectively private motorists subsidise things like buses and trucks, massively. I pay the equivalent of about $1 per 5 miles in my car tax, and more in the fuel tax.
What is expensive about rail is the insane set of rules and regulations about safety and finance - which, unlike on the road, are strictly observed. To spend $x on a railway project (like lengthening a platform to enable longer trains to use it) you will need to spend $5x on a safety case and $5x on a financial case. I have seen it at close hand.
Where do you live that politicians like rail? My politicians love cars, and have been actively removing rail at every chance.
Same where I am (in the UK). Mrs Thatcher set the tone - only known to have travelled on a train once in her adult life and that was for a ceremony.
Conservatives hate railways because they think they are nests of trade unionism.
Liberals hate railways because they are essentially run in authoritarian ways.
Socialists hate railways because they think they are transport for rich people (This is the UK remember).
the most frequent cause of sudden speed changes I see is people driving too slowly as they try to merge onto the freeway. That causes people already on the freeway to have to slow down or change lanes to avoid them, which increases the risk of an accident.
It is even worse if you are joining the freeway immediately behind that person because you are the one that the truck behind will crash into.
And TFA comparing car and train capacity is silly because it excludes time spent stopping to load/unload passengers. The whole reason people drive cars instead of take public transportation is because (1) they're sick of waiting for the bus/train to show up, and (2) they're sick of the trip taking 2x-3x longer than if they drive because the bus/train has to stop at a bunch of places they're not interested in going.
That is obviously an American view; I understand trains there are rather slow, and if people are that slow getting on and off them it is probably because they are not used to them enough. I try to make workaday journeys by train in the UK because I am sick of sitting in my car in traffic jams taking 2x-3x longer than the train. The last time I drove from Bristol to a suburb in London (130 miles) four years ago it took so long and was so frustrating that I vowed never to drive that journey ever again. I stick to using my car for recreational journeys and local shopping trips nowadays, UK road traffic has become so bad.
A London Underground railway line, in its 12ft diameter tunnel, even with its stops, can shift more people per hour than a three-lane highway, both at max capacity.
Well the idea is it wouldn't since they would all hit the breaks at the same time, there should be almost no latency between the 4th car and the 10th
Almost no latency? 4th and 10th !! Multiply that up - what about a thousand cars, or ten thousand, all in line in the rush-hour between say London and Reading (on the M4 motorway in the UK). One minor incident anywhere in those 40 miles (even a routine one like a car in the outer lane needing to get across the inner lanes to turn off) and every car in the entire line must slow or stop in exactly the same way. That's assuming nothing goes wrong (what could possibly?). It is going to be a very jerky journey because there is no cushioning as there is at present.
My third biggest cringe is people hanging on by their hands for more than 30 seconds.
Getting a bit off topic, but even worse, they hang on by one hand only. In fact deliberately let go with the other hand and wave it around pointlessly.
you always see the fights taking place between human/oid opponents manually aiming weapons at each other from less than one hundred feet apart
Aren't you exagerating the distance? I've only seen glimpses of Star Wars, but I seem to remember seeing guys in black leather gowns, toe-to-toe, whacking each other with pink flourescent light tubes. Looked a bit camp to me.
They live on planets with breathable air, too, and have usually, perchance, evolved technically, politically and culturally to about the same point as Earthlings : ie within a few hundred years one way or the other.
The "goodies" among them have exactly the same ethical views as the "good" Earthlings too - a fallacy shared (more seriously) by those among us who see no harm in establishing communication with any real alien intelligent life that we may detect.
So would a hosts file help? Is there anyone here who could post a long and detailed description of what a hosts file could do for us?
Who cares about those people anyway? They don't contribute, they don't produce, they don't pay taxes, or grow the economy.
The worst thing is that they are apparently incapable of coming up with things like street names or block names for themselves (according to TFA anyway).
Come on you 75%, it isn't rocket science.
The only really positive comment I have seen here, from a guy with his first ever post.
Nice astroturfing.
are we really going to get the world to start using an algorithm for determining location that appears to be proprietary and closed-source? ......... Why would anyone build any type of important solution or process on top of this and have their hands tied to this one vendor
Don't worry, market forces and competition will be our friends. Other companies will introduce rival systems with totally different word combinations. In time there will be dozens of alternatives, all different. So your address will need all of them with perhaps semi-colons between each, and each to include a fourth word for the mapping or courier company or other organisation that runs the scheme. So this might be my address :-
exploding.giant.dump.what3words;handsome.troll.bollocks.ups;paedophile.boy.wanker.boy_scouts_association;windows.scam.caller.Indian_Government_Mapping;
metrosexual.brick.shithouse.kamakaze_cycle_kouriers;fancy.gay.prancer.US_Post_Office;bloody.hell.sherlock.Ordnance_Survey;damn.blast.soddit.royal_mail;
and so on (my emphasis). More than three words now, but what fun.
the word combinations are deliberately defined so that any valid similar 3 word addresses map to places so far apart that it should be obvious .. that you have used the wrong address.
It is never possible to under-estimate the intelligence of a courier.
Do I share my 3 words with my downstairs neighbor?
Yes
bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year.
So how will this system solve that? A sender can still give a bad address. Most badly addressed mail that I nevertheless get has the postcode wrong, a fairly arbitrary set of letters and numbers. This new system is a totally arbitrary set of words. People do not remember post codes - they copy them from an address book, incoming letter, or database and can copy it wrongly. Likewise, people are not going to remember these word triplets (I've got 50 Xmas cards to send), they will copy them from an address book, incoming letter, or database and can still copy it wrongly. Get one word wrong (I gather pluralisation matters) and it will go to Timbuctoo instead of Kansas.
It would save the Royal Mail and other couriers a lot if their guys actually rang my doorbell when they arrive instead of just posting a "You were out" card through - they seem to have a phobia about it. But I live in a remote scenic area and I think they like the idea of a second morning's relaxing drive this way instead of fighting city traffic the following day.
There are premium accounts where they will throw in a bundle of stuff (e.g. travel insurance, higher interest on current accounts) but they are a rip-off.
There, that's sorted.
This seems odd, addresses are broken down into discrete fields in UK credit reference data
Stop there. That is the problem - my address does not fit into those fields.
I live on a country road that has no name. The address I give is House name - Nearest Town [10 miles away] - County - Post code That is how it is in the Electoral Register and in the Royal Mail database too.
However, when I (or a bank staff member) fill in a computerised application form, the computer insists on a road name or it will not proceed. (As you say, there are discrete fields). So I make a [plausible] road name up. Then the computer goes and checks it against the Electoral Register (or some other datbase it gets from God knows where) and, guess what, it does not match. I am rejected.
I have this problem over and over again, with all sorts of things. People I am dealing with over the counter can see the problem, but they cannot beat the computer system. It is going to get worse with the UK Government talking about requiring address verification for any money transfer. They need to get databases created with a bit of intelligence first.
What does it cost for a bank account in the UK? Are they pursuing collecting two monthy fees from each consumer?
It costs nothing. In fact UK banks used to give interest even on cheque accounts (but no more)
Having said that, some banks have "Gold" accounts (or some such name) which do charge a fee in return for allowing a bigger overdraft or "personal attention" from the manager whatever that involves. I pay no fees, don't need personal attention, never need an overdraft, but am constantly bombarded with hype urging me to "upgrade" to a "gold" account. My banks also have a Byzantine system of fees for stuff like cancelling a cheque or raising your overdraft limit temporarily. I never need any of it.
The day any of my banks (I have about five) try to charge me fees I will withdraw the lot.
where do I get all this magic money you speak of? Working full time does not do it.
Sounds like I am better off than most here, so here are a dozen tips :-
1) Avoid rip-offs. Because all tradesmen (plumbers, decorators, electricians, car mechanics, carpet-layers) rip you off, do everything yourself. I do my own car maintenance (even repairing gearboxes), I have replaced facia boards and guttering around my house, done bricklaying, been up the roof to the chimney to repoint it, even built a chimney.
2) Don't go on fancy holidays. Millions of people (even people who tell me they've "got no money") spend their money to travel around the world on holidays to the Valley of the Kings, Thailand, the Outback etc. Stay at home, or just go locally.
3) Dont eat out or use take-aways.
4) Don't buy stuff (like coffee) from vending machines.
5) Don't go into coffee shops.
6) Don't buy insurance (unless legally required), it's a serious rip-off. Take the risk.
7) Don't go into bars.
8) Never throw anything away. It's suprising how often something is needed again years later.
9) Make your own stuff. Preferably using material you saved in (8). Like making new furniture from the timber of old furniture (which is better timber than you can obtain these days anyway).
10) When you need to buy stuff, buy stuff that's out of fashion, cheap.
11) Don't buy Microsoft products.
12) Don't buy Apple products.
Hope this helps. Sounds too austere? The choice is yours.
He does. Have you considered learning the language of the place you live in?
I am also in the UK and also struggled to understand what the GGP meant by "secured", and I don't consider there is much wrong with my English apart from the occasional typpppppo.
I think what the GGP meant by "secured" is "obtained". In UK English, "secured" generally means "made safe", hence the trans-Atlantic confusion. It is particularly ambiguous in this discussion which is in fact about making money safe.
I believe that what the GGP is saying is that many people do not have enough money to worry about the bank losing or stealing it, or even to be worthwhile putting in a bank at all. Yes, we know that.
For most people getting a bank account in two different countries is quite difficult.
Only if you're American
It has become difficult in the UK to get a bank account in the UK. I have had two applications refused in the last year because the version of my address in the database that the bank uses to auto-complete my address when I type it into the application form is different from the version it then looks up in the electoral roll. At another bank the manager only succeeded in opening an account for me by fiddling the computer somehow.